George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I do not say this in a chiding way; I say quite seriously to you, as someone who has given your life to the Australian Labor Party: be careful what you wish for, because these allies of yours at whose behest you formed government are your most lethal political enemies. They are more lethal political enemies for the Australian Labor Party than the coalition are, because we may be the alternative government but the Greens are the alternative party of the Left and they will eat you up, and I know that many, many of your colleagues are deeply concerned about it. Why do you think it is that today, among voters for the left, more than a third would prefer to vote for the Australian Greens than for the Australian Labor Party? That is what the latest opinion polls show: a Labor Party primary vote of 29 per cent and a Greens primary vote of 15 per cent. They have lost a third of their electoral base to these people—a third. If those figures are disaggregated by generation, a voter of left-wing sympathies who is under the age of 30 is just as likely to vote for the Greens as for the Australian Labor Party. And a voter under the age of 25 whose sympathies are with the left is actually more likely to vote for the Greens than to vote for the Australian Labor Party.

I know that the smart people in the Australian Labor Party are deeply, deeply worried about this trend—and so they should be. The Greens are not like the One Nation party in the 1990s, which was a fly-by-night phenomenon—largely a personality cult, driven by the circumstances of the time. The Greens are here to stay. With each passing year, like a flyblown sheep, the Labor Party will be hollowed out by the rise of the Greens. And they brought this upon themselves by being prepared to pay the 30 pieces of silver to Senator Bob Brown in order to get in to government after the 2010 election. The Australian Labor Party should be particularly ashamed and afraid of the new authoritarian tone that the Greens have brought to Australian politics, which Labor has embraced as the price of government.

Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, a few years ago was asked, 'What went wrong with the environmental movement?' He said:

… following the falling of the Berlin wall, and the end of the peace movement, and the end of radical socialist politics in the labor and women's movement, an awful lot of those people drifted into environmentalism. It's been highjacked by political and social activists who are using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-corporate and class warfare than they do with ecology or saving the environment.

That is the Greens. The mask of environmental concern has been stripped away. Nothing could demonstrate that more clearly, in a symbolic fashion, than this motion we are debating today to install a Greens senator with no credentials as the chairman of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee of this Senate in place of a senator of experience who is respected by both sides.

The Greens will use that bully pulpit to prosecute a radical agenda, inconsistent with the values of not only the coalition side of the chamber but of most on the Labor side as well. The Australian Labor Party, for its many faults, has always been a party committed to democratic values. But the Greens are not committed to democratic values. They are a party of zealots. They are a party of cold-eyed fanatics. They are a party that embodies the authoritarian cast of mind. Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in the fact that, with insouciance and glee, they are prepared to foist on the Australian people a vast new tax that both sides of politics promised at the election last year that they would not introduce.

The Australian Labor Party has embraced its most lethal political enemy. It has disregarded the advice that an appeaser is a person who keeps feeding the crocodile in the hope that he will be the last to be eaten. As I said before, by appeasing the Greens—by embracing them, by allowing the government's agenda to be dictated by the first truly authoritarian party we have seen represented in the Australian parliament—the Australian Labor Party have signed their own death warrant. They have ceded the ground of the so-called progressive left to their most lethal enemy, who are determined to displace them. Every time the Australian Labor Party goes along with a power play like this and rolls over for the Greens—meekly, timidly, reluctantly but inevitably—they execute, once again, that political death warrant.

So I will close the debate for the opposition by saying that the Senate is being presumed upon this afternoon by a travesty of a resolution, in furtherance of a power play of which, superficially, Senator Gary Humphries is the victim and the proper process of the Senate is the victim. But the true victim of the Greens is the Australian Labor Party and the political tradition it represents. In years to come, when historians write the history of these times and chart the decline of the Australian Labor Party—as, in decades to come, they will—they will locate this parliament and, in particular, the Labor-Greens alliance as the point at which that remorseless decline began. Question put:

That the amendment (Senator Bob Brown's) be agreed to.

The Senate divided. [12:41]

(The Acting Deputy President—Senator Cameron)

Question negatived. Question put:

That the amendment (Senator Abetz's) be agreed to.

The Senate divided. [12:49]

(The President—Senator Hogg)

Question negatived

Original question put:

That the motion (Senator Ludwig's) be agreed to.

The Senate divided. [12:53]

(The President—Senator Hogg)

Question agreed to.